Sign in

Leader of the PACs

Barack Obama’s new embrace of Super PACs is a concession to the reality of running for President in 2012: it’s not enough to be an incumbent President, with one of the best networks of small donors in history. In this campaign, every candidate needs his own billionaires.

“The difference this year,” an adviser to Mitt Romney, who asked to speak on background, told me, “is that instead of party hierarchies, we have clans.” Leading the clans are wealthy donors, many with access to corporate treasuries. Arming them: some of the best political professionals money can buy, including veteran hardball players like Larry McCarthy, the ad man I profiled this week, who’s working for the pro-Romney Super PAC Restore Our Future. Although the Super PACs are supposed to be independent of the official campaigns, they are, for all intents and purposes, the lead warriors on this new political battlefield.

Obama’s decision to make high-level campaign and Administration officials available to speak at events held by the Super PAC that supports him is part of a belated effort to goose liberal donors, many of whom have been reluctant to write big checks to the group. And it’s a result of Democrats’ alarm at the most recent financial disclosures to the Federal Elections Commission, which were made public at the end of last month. Obama’s campaign has been out-raising Romney’s, but the pro-Obama Super PAC, Priorities USA Action, has lagged far behind its Republican counterparts.

Two groups that were formed with help from the Republican strategist Karl Rove, American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, raised $51 million between them last year for the Congressional and presidential races. Groups supporting specific Republican presidential candidates brought in roughly $40 million, including $30 million for the group backing Mitt Romney.

But the major Democratic groups, including Priorities USA Action, raised only $19 million for the year.

One indicator of how outmatched the President’s forces have been was Priorities USA Action’s failure to reply after Obama was hit by a negative ad campaign launched by Americans for Prosperity, an outside conservative group co-founded by oil, chemical, and lumber magnate David Koch. The six-million-dollar ad campaign attacked Obama for his Administration’s controversial, money-losing loan guarantees to Solyndra, a manufacturer of solar-energy equipment. Had the pro-Obama PAC been better funded, it would have answered these outside attack ads with a spot of its own. Instead, the official reëlection campaign was forced to draw on its own funds to respond.

To the dismay of some in Obama circles, this also meant that the President was unable to leave the dirty work to an anonymous, unaccountable Super PAC and keep his distance from the ad wars. He had to put his own name and the “I approve this message” tagline on the negative ad his campaign ran.

The situation caused grumbling. Some wondered whether the two young former White House aides who founded American Priorities USA, Bill Burton and Sean Sweeney, had enough standing to convince major donors to contribute millions of dollars. Evidently, to remedy the situation, Obama and his campaign advisers have decided now to send more senior members of the Administration to encourage donors to give to the Super PAC. But Obama, unlike Romney, will not himself appear at PAC functions. Nor will Michelle Obama, or the Bidens. Legally, the candidates can’t be seen as coördinating with the outside PACs.

Obama has been a critic of the court rulings that have opened the floodgates to such unlimited outside spending. But as Jim Messina, the manager of Obama’s reëlection campaign, put it, “We’re not going to fight this fight with one hand tied behind our back. With so much at stake, we can’t allow for two sets of rules. Democrats can’t be unilaterally disarmed.”